Literacy done right

DrEff and I went for a long walk today. It seems that good eats feature prominently on our Toronto Bucket List. We found ourselves on Baldwin St. where we had some delicious 2-bite snacks at Yung Sing Pastry Shop.



During our walk we happened -- quite unexpectedly -- upon Toronto's Word on the Street festival. As evidenced by this photo, this event seems to have a positive impact on literacy:

Signs

About two years ago Bob McLean, a dear friend and colleague, was in London and shot this photo. I liked the photo as soon as I saw it and have been looking for an opportunity to use it ever since. There have been many significant changes in my life over the past few months, and this photo sums up things quite well. The three signs in the photo are equally applicable. Some of you who know me know that I have set a deadline of December 31st, 2008 for completing a draft of my thesis. That's 14 weeks away. I'm working to a tight deadline based on a detailed outline but I keep losing time to diversions (some unavoidable). The new year holds promise of great opportunities and I must finish. Tempus fugit.

(How Not To Use) Multi-touch in Education

Whereas I would normally applaud the use of such technology in education, I cannot help but ask "What's wrong with this picture?"



See the full story at Engadget.

ICLS 2008 Photos

I have finally gotten around to uploading a few photos from the ICLS 2008 conference held in Utrecht this past June. The highlights included the workshop on Interaction Analysis.

Knowledge Forum API

I had the pleasure of meeting Stian Håklev yesterday who asked me about APIs for Knowledge Forum. We have a little-known site called Knowledge Forum Coders that documents the APIs, such as they are.

The Ubiquity of Command Lines

As many of my colleagues know I'm a big fan of the command line. I find it somewhat ironic that I work with information visualizations, and yet I have a penchant for just getting in there with plain old text commands to actually accomplish things. I even prefer command-line statistical analysis packages (or, perhaps more accurately, the command-line interface to statistical packages). It probably comes as little surprise that I really like the new Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. I suspect Quicksilver users will love this. I know I do.

PwnageTool and My iPhone

This morning, in a wild attempt to actually complete something, I decided to upgrade my 1st-generation iPhone to a more up-to-date version of the firmware. I grabbed the PwnageTool. All went well, thanks to the various instructions available around the web. My only regret: deciding at the final step to "set up phone as new" rather than "restore from backup". I was concerned about having problems with Mail, per some of the reports, but didn't clue in that I would lose the photos on the iPhone as a result. There was only one photo that I really regretted losing: a quirky sign on the doors of the library at work warning users about "unstable computers". Oh well.